Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Explosively Formed Penetrators

Frightening:

NYTimes:

"E.F.P.’s are one of the most devastating weapons on the
battlefield. The weapons fire a semi-molten copper slug that cuts
through the armor on a Humvee, then shatters inside the vehicle,
creating a deadly hail of hot metal that causes especially gruesome
wounds even when it does not kill.

Many of the E.F.P.’s
encountered by American forces in Iraq are both difficult to detect and
extremely destructive. Because they fire from the side of the road,
there is no need to dig a hole to plant them, so they are well suited
for urban settings. Because they are set off by a passive infrared
sensor, the kind of motion detector that turns on security lights, they
cannot be countered by electronic jamming.

Adversaries have
used the weapon in new ways. On Feb. 12, a British Air Force C-130 was
damaged by two E.F.P arrays as it landed on an airstrip in Maysan
Province, the first time the device was used to attack an aircraft,
according to allied officials. Allied forces later destroyed the
aircraft with a 1,000-pound bomb to keep militants from pilfering
equipment.

Over the course of the war, the devices have
accounted for only a small fraction of the roadside bomb attacks in
Iraq; most bombing attacks and most American deaths have been caused by
less sophisticated devices favored by Sunni insurgents, not Shiite
militias linked to Iran. But E.F.P.’s produce significantly more
casualties per attack than other types of roadside bombs.

“They
were a new type of threat with a great potential for damage,” said Lt.
Col. Kevin W. Farrell, who commanded the First Battalion, 64th Armor of
the Third Infantry Division, in 2005, when a penetrator punched through
the skirt armor of one of the battalion’s M-1 tanks and cracked its
hull. “They accounted for a sizable percentage of our casualties. Based
on searches of the Baghdad environment we occupied and multiple local
Iraqi sources, we believed that they came from Iran.”